LWN Weekly Edition
Front pageSecurity
Kernel development
Distributions
Development
Linux in the news
Announcements
->One big page
This page
Previous weekFollowing week
Sponsored link
Serve your customers, not your servers, with VERIO Linux VPS. Full-access test-drive here.
| Weekly edition | Kernel | Security | Distributions | Search |
| Archives | Calendar | Subscribe | Write for LWN | LWN.net FAQ |
Distributions
News and Editorials
A draft proposal for Fedora spins
This week Jeff Spaleta posted a draft proposal for a spin submission and approval process. For those interested in creating officially approved Fedora spins, it is worth a look.Anyone can create a Fedora spin for their personal use. Just create a kickstart file to install the packages you want. There are various ways of doing this, but the Anaconda kickstart is probably the most common. This kickstart file tells the Anaconda installer what packages you want, and you have your own Fedora spin.
This draft is about creating official spins that will be listed at the Fedora Project Spins Tracker, and available for interested users to get the official Fedora spin of their choice. However there does need to be a way to cleanly distinguish between Released Spins and Contributed Spins.
What will it take to create an official Fedora spin according to this proposal? The first step is get a kickstart file into the Kickstart Pool, where the file will be reviewed and tested by a peer group of Spin Maintainers. If the peer group approves then the spin proposal goes to the board for review. If the Fedora Board approves the spin it will be granted trademark usage and from there it can be added to the Fedora CVS.
A number of steps need to be completed for this plan to work. First is the creation of Spin Guidelines. The guidelines will specify a minimum level of technical quality for kickstart files, and contain a naming scheme for new spins. The not-yet-formed peer group of Spin Maintainers will have some say in these Guidelines, although the release engineering team will probably create the first draft.
There is a long way to go to get a straightforward way for a Fedora Special Interest Group (or anyone else) to get a spin approved, but such things always have a start somewhere.
New Releases
FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE available
The first stable FreeBSD 7.0 release is out. There's a lot of new features and performance improvements claimed. "Dramatic improvements in performance and SMP scalability shown by various database and other benchmarks, in some cases showing peak performance improvements as high as 350% over FreeBSD 6.X under normal loads and 1500% at high loads. When compared with the best performing Linux kernel (2.6.22 or 2.6.24) performance is 15% better."
Kubuntu-KDE4 Alpha Released
The first alpha release of the Kubuntu distribution with KDE4 is available. "There will be two editions of Kubuntu with the 8.04 release, a commercially supported KDE 3 edition and a community supported KDE 4 edition. It includes KDE 4.0.1 and a few applications from KDE 3 to fill in any gaps. This is our first alpha for the KDE 4 version of Kubuntu."
Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring RC 1 "Serapia" released
The first release candidate of Mandriva Linux 2008.1 has been released. "This pre-release includes the all-new artwork for the 2008 Spring release, further improvements to the Mandriva software management tools, WPA-EAP support in the network configuration tools, KDE 3.5.9 and available 4.0.1, some new default applications in KDE and GNOME, and the latest pre-release of OpenOffice.org 2.4."
Distribution News
Debian GNU/Linux
Debian Project Leader Elections 2008: Call for nominations
The Debian project is looking for nominations for the Project Leader role. Nominations are due by Sunday March 9, 2008 and a new project leader will take office on April 17th. In between, there will be a campaign, with IRC debates, and a vote. Click below for more details.
Release Update: Release numbering, goals, armel architecture, BSPs
Marc 'HE' Brockschmidt takes a look at the Debian Lenny release. "There haven't been any changes in our release schedule. Please note that we want to release lenny in *6 months*..."
Bits from the listmaster team
The Debian listmaster team has been improving the setup of the listserver. Quite a few things have happened since the update last September. Click below for some highlights; including the new hosting location, the new list archive search engine, config cleanup, better bounce handling, de-spamming the list archive, and more.
Security Support for Debian 3.1 to be terminated
Security support for Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 (Sarge) will be terminated on March 31, 2008. "One year after the release of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 alias 'etch' and nearly three years after the release of Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 alias 'sarge' the security support for the old distribution (3.1 alias 'sarge') is coming to an end next month. The Debian project is proud to be able to support its old distribution for such a long time and even for one year after a new version has been released."
Fedora
Proposal: Fedora@Home
The Fedora project has just begun considering a proposal (from Red Hat) to incorporate the MRG grid scheduler into its distribution. This would enable Fedora users to donate their spare CPU cycles to some worthy project. "This would be fantastic for Fedora as it would allow us to lead the open source movement into the area of open services and community computing based on open source. It would also be a great marketing showcase for Fedora by showing our leadership in grid technology and in the power of our community. And, it would provide Fedora users a feel-good way to contribute to Fedora--even if they don't code--by contributing CPU cycles towards things like builds or automated testing."
Fedora Beta freeze/release slipping by a week
Anyone who has been running Fedora rawhide, or keeping up with the mail on the 'testers' list knows that rawhide has been quite unstable. The Fedora 9 beta has been postponed for a week to stabilize rawhide, fix problems in X and get the impending release of perl-5.10.0 into the system.
Fedora Board Recap 2008-FEB-26
Click below for some notes on the February 26, 2008 meeting of the Fedora Board. Topics discussed include secondary arch hosting, fedoraproject.org mail, status of PPC, Summer of Code, and several other topics.
Gentoo Linux
Gentoo Foundation 2008 Elections - Results
New trustees of the Gentoo Foundation have been elected. The winners are Roy Bamford (neddyseagoon), Ferris McCormick (fmccor), Joshua Jackson (tsunam), Tom Gall (tgall) and William Thomson (wltjr).
Mandriva Linux
What's coming in Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring
The Mandriva developers are putting together a "what's coming" document describing the 2008 Spring release, which has just gone into release-candidate status. "The graphical software manager now defaults to searching only among applications with a graphical user interface, rather than among all available packages (of course, it is still easy to switch to searching through all available packages), reducing the confusion new and inexperienced users find on being presented with lots of packages they likely are not interested in installing."
SUSE Linux and openSUSE
openSUSE Board elections
The current openSUSE board is working on a proposal for organizing the elections of the next board. "As a first step, and also because we want it to be an open and transparent process, we'd like to hear about ideas and recommendations about how we should do that."
Distribution Newsletters
Fedora Weekly News Issue 122
The Fedora Weekly News for February 25, 2008 looks at "Banners for Interviews", "Network Manager Interview", "New Fedora Chair plans to remove obstacles for volunteers" and much more.
OpenSUSE Weekly News/12
This week the OpenSUSE Weekly News covers small changes, continued work on slimming down the installation, Firefox 3.0 beta 3 packages, expanded Lenovo SUSE Linux offerings, and much more.
Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter #80
The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter for March 1, 2008 covers the Alpha 6 Freeze, the release of Kubuntu-KDE4, Full Circle Magazine #10, Ubuntu Mobile, launch of Ubuntu Brainstorm, a Mark Shuttleworth Interview, and much more.
DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 242
The DistroWatch Weekly for March 3, 2008 is out. "The delayed FreeBSD 7.0 was finally released last week and there is a lot to be excited about - especially if you deploy this excellent operating system on servers. But how about the desktop users? Is this latest version ready to take over our workstations? Read our first look review to find out. In the news section, the Debian release team contemplates the inclusion of KDE 4 in "Lenny", KNOPPIX springs to life at CeBIT with a new live DVD, Mandriva continues its relentless march towards version 2008.1, and Fedora discusses improvements in NetworkManager. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the DistroWatch February 2008 donation is Frugalware Linux, a community distribution from Hungary."
Interviews
Fedora Project Leader: Hello and Goodbye
In his ongoing series of interviews on the Fedora wiki, Jonathan Roberts talks to both the incoming and outgoing Fedora Project Leaders, Paul Frields and Max Spevack respectively. The interview covers the history of the position, how it came about, what Spevack accomplished, what Frields hopes to accomplish, and more. "Paul: To be honest, like most Fedora contributors outside Red Hat, I didn't know Max. However, I did know that Matthew Szulik had asked Max specifically to do this job. I also knew Matthew was totally committed to an open culture that promoted work like that of Fedora, so I knew that his choice would be informed by those principles. If he was putting his faith in Max, I was pretty certain we could expect someone carrying those principles into practice. When I met Max at the Fedora Core 5 FUDCon in 2006 I knew he was definitely one of us! And the last two years have been a real testament to that good judgment on Matthew's part."
People of openSUSE: Marcus Rueckert
This week the People of openSUSE talks with Marcus Rueckert, also known as darix. "When did you join the openSUSE community and what made you do that? I don't think you can really join a community. You grow into it. When more and more stuff got moved to Linux I started hanging out on some Linux IRC channels in ircnet. Later some OSS project channels got added to the list. And at some point I started packaging stuff I needed for my servers. The first 2 SuSE guys I met on IRC were mmj and daemon. I got invited to join the beta program and later started working directly at SuSE."
Distribution reviews
The best Linux system repair disk graduates to 1.0 (Linux-Watch)
Linux-Watch takes a look at the recent release of SystemRescueCd v1.0. "For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of using SystemRescueCd, the Linux kernel 2.6.24.2-based distribution can be booted from either a CD-ROM or a USB stick. Once it's running, and I've yet to meet a busted PC that still had a working CPU and memory it couldn't run on, you have your choice of the lightweight WindowsMaker GUI or a shell command-line interface."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol
Next page: Development>>